


Freedom

by Kissa



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Battle Couple, Jace Wayland Feels, M/M, Parabatai, Parabatai Feels, Protective Alec Lightwood, Trust, Young Jalec
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 23:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29741193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kissa/pseuds/Kissa
Summary: Jace has been taught that, no matter who he is surrounded by, and where he may find himself, he is alone and at war with everyone. Alec proves his father's teachings wrong.
Relationships: Alec Lightwood & Jace Wayland
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18
Collections: Jalec Prompt Challenge - February





	Freedom

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Jalec Prompt Challenge's February prompt "first times".  
> This is Jace experiencing trust and freedom from his father's misguided teachings for the first time.
> 
> ETA: I know it was supposed to be 1000 words... now. I completely forgot while I was writing and sat happily on my ass, feeling accomplished until I saw everyone else managed to bang exactly 1000 words out. Brings back some school times memories... Anyway, mea culpa, I already helped myself to an L.

Having a parabatai means he’ll never feel alone again. Jace carries inside him a slice of happiness and comfort that’s always there for him, one that Alec so generously shared with him.  
  
He was practically feral when Robert Lightwood brought him to the Institute. Having grown up alone with his instructor, strike that, his abuser, Jace didn’t know at first how to relate to Alec and Izzy. They showed him he was fine the way he was, and they gave him time and treated him with kindness and friendship even when he himself thought his actions didn’t warrant that, letting him open up when he felt safe enough to do so.  
  
But that feeling, that cursed feeling of knowing how dark he was inside, how at the end of it all, it was still him, on his own, against the rest of the world, because no one had his back? That feeling stayed, it just burrowed itself deeper under the layers of warm acceptance and even love that Izzy and Alec so kindly lavished upon him. 

* * *

There comes a time when simulations are behind them and they graduate to actual demon hunting.  
  
It’s a cool night out in New York and the two parabatai were sent out, just the two of them, to test their bond. It’s a make-or-break graduation of sorts, where the stakes are not glory and gratitude, but their very lives.  
  
They are young, objectively too young to be sent out to fight demons on their own, but they are the best of their class and they’re parabatai.  
  
Jace is not afraid, or, if he is, he has it in check - so he tells himself. He can feel Alec next to him, and Alec is scared shitless, the bond tells Jace this much. But Alec is also too ashamed to show he is afraid and he has his game face on, bow at the ready.  
  
They walk soundlessly through the poorly lit tunnels, until a shadow crosses the tunnel ahead of them. It’s the demon, and Jace signs he’ll go ahead and flush the demon toward Alec, who will stay here. Together, they’ll send it back to where it came from.  
  
Alec nods and watches his parabatai disappear into the darkness ahead.  
  
He waits a minute, he waits three, but the silence seems to last forever, and it makes Alec anxious. Jace is reliable, if he said he’ll be here, he’ll be here, unless…  
  
He puts his bow on his back and draws his sword. It’s kind of a bummer, finally he gets to go on a real hunt and he can’t use his bow. But Alec seldom gets what he wants, and he’s used to disappointment coming to pull the rug from under his feet right when he’s having the most fun.  
  
When he gets to the end of the tunnel, he sees why Jace didn’t chase the demon to where he was waiting.  
  
There are three demons, and by the traces of ichor and burn marks, there were five and Jace killed two already, but the other three have Jace backed into a corner and are pacing in front of him. Jace’s stele is somewhere on the floor, still intact, but behind the demons.  
  
Jace has the calm and composure to not blow Alec’s arrival away with a facial expression or a sound, and that gives Alec the opening he needed to skewer the closest demon.  
  
Now the playing field is level, but the demons are more desperate and pressed.  
  
Alec is sure they can smell his fear and they see how young the two Nephilim are, so they still feel like they will walk out of this and go about their nefarious business.  
  
But even without his stele, Jace is still a force to be reckoned with and he took out two demons on his own.  
  
The parabatai move like one. A single nod between them, and they take their positions. Just like in training. Jace throws himself to the ground and slides between the demons’ legs, and while he doesn’t have a good angle to cleave them with his blade, he gets to Alec, and now they are backing the demons against the wall.  
  
Tails shoot out, venom glands extend, claws grab, hideous snouts snap at the Nephilim.  
  
Blades light up and swoosh through the air, daggers are held close to chests in combat guard.

It’s a dance of death and no one is leading. For now.  
  
Alec gets disarmed and he fights his demon with his bare hands, until Jace throws him his sword, just in the right position for Alec to use it and cut the demon attacking him in half, vaporizing it and sending it to the chaos realm it came from.

* * *

Now it’s a rock and a hard place kind of situation, and Jace put himself in it - all because he couldn’t trust Alec to defend himself and remain unharmed while without an angel blade.  
  
Now he is the unarmed one, and the more afraid one of them has the blade.  
  
Will Alec run and save himself, hoping Jace can finish off the last demon? It’s a split second doubt in Jace’s mind, but it summons a lifetime of training and conditioning. He hears his father, teaching him, with the harshest methods, that no one, absolutely no one will truly have his back, and everyone will rush to betray him when push comes to shove. 

The demon decides, since it’s closer to Jace now, that it may be curtains for it, but at least it’s taking one of the Nephilim with him, so it turns to Jace and strikes.  
  
The claws catch Jace across the chest, ripping his favourite jacket and his shirt, drawing blood. But a glowing blade soon buries itself into the demon’s back, exiting through its front and turning the demon to ashes.  
  
Once the big demon vanishes, Jace sees Alec, some distance away, looking very pleased and rubbing his hands together as though he is getting rid of some leftover dust.  
  
“Not bad, for a first time.” Alec comments. “You alright?”  
  
Jace nods, but he is distracted by his mind racing.  
  
Alec just disproved everything his father taught him.  
  
He could have thrown Jace the sword back. He could have run. He could have frozen in fear.  
  
But he didn’t. Even with his fear roaring in the bond, Alec acted to protect and save his parabatai.  
  
“You’re bleeding.” Alec points out. “Let me see.”  
  
“It’s just a scratch. I’ll be fine.”  
  
“Let me iratze that and then you can be a tough guy all you want.”  
  
Alec pulls Jace’s shirt up all the way to the collar, exposing his parabatai’s toned front and sighing softly. The “scratch” is a bunch of pretty deep gashes, and they need monitoring in case some demon filth got in there and risks infecting Jace’s blood. For now, Alec draws the iratze and watches Jace close his eyes and moan softly at the searing burn of the rune, which the parabatai bond makes up for by flooding Jace’s body with endorphins.

* * *

When Jace opens his eyes and looks at Alec, his parabatai's pupils are blown and Jace has to bite his lip. He knew all these things theoretically before, that runes drawn by parabatai are more powerful than any other runes, but actually feeling it, after their first victory, is such a potent and inebriating feeling. He feels at one with the whole world, as though his skin is now a permeable barrier that melts into the rest of the elements around him, making him one with Alec, with the dust particles floating in the small beams of light in the distance and everything around them.  
  
This feeling… Jace has never felt so light and so powerful. He doesn’t even realise he took Alec’s hand in his and is holding it as he looks at his parabatai in utter awe.  
  
It’s too late for poor little scared child Jace - by the time he realises what is happening, and that the glow he sees Alec enveloped in is the golden, ineffable light of love, he is vanishing away, falling apart like butterfly wings drying up in the sun.  
  
The scared little being that Michael Wayland tormented and shaped into a weapon is no more. In his stead, there’s a new Jace now. One who has friends, a brother and a sister, a parabatai who has his back and who just defeated his own, much scarier inner demons in order to come to his aid, disproving with one gesture everything that Jace’s father taught him.  
  
To love might be to destroy. But it’s also getting knocked down nine times and getting up ten. It’s walking through hell carrying a mouthful of water for your parched love. It’s opening the curtains and letting the sun burn away the monsters under the bed. It’s holding your friend’s hand as he crumbles to dust and binding him back into shape with your own tears.  
  
And what Jace is feeling right now is stronger than life, than death and even than ecstasy - it’s the heady, rarefied air of freedom from all the fears that were planted inside him. He is no longer alone inside his heart or his mind. With one split-second choice, Alec completed what the parabatai bond started, giving Jace his life back and allowing him to step out from under Michael Wayland’s shadow.  
  
And Alec is oblivious to the power he wields - even as he pulls Jace’s shirt down, retrieves his stele so that Izzy doesn’t peel Jace like a banana as soon as they return for losing yet another one and stammers that they have to get out of there and return to the Institute to report.  
  
Jace could kiss Alec right now, and he finds he actually has a great need to do so. But there are probably cameras all over, both mundane and planted by the Institute wanting to keep an eye on the parabatai graduation.  
  
They return home by taking a shortcut through an old cemetery - and Jace is skipping. After a while, since Alec is merely following him with an amused and smitten look on his face, Jace runs back to him, pokes him right in the middle of his chest and says: “tag, you’re it” before booking it across the graves and alleys, with Alec now in hot pursuit.  
  
(the end)  
  
  



End file.
